OK Go’s one-take zero gravity music video, here’s how they did it

Chances are you know the band OK Go because of their music videos, not because you’re buying up every OK Go album when a new one hits iTunes. The band strode into our hearts with a video for their song “Here it Goes Again” where they performed choreography on a series of treadmills. That video got OK Go some attention and instead of riding on the music video laurels of a single success, they began making more and more complex music videos, often shot in one take.

This time, the band has taken to the sky to make a video for their song “Upside Down & Inside Out” that makes use of a reduced gravity aircraft to do the whole video in zero gravity.

OK Go and the video’s director Trish Sie (who also worked on “Here it Goes Again”) shot the entire video in one take on an airplane that was making parabolas in the sky, allowing for periods of about 27 seconds of weightlessness. The process of planning and choreographing the video ended up being a complex series of problems with both gravity and the choreographed motion of the song.

The Russian-based S7 Airlines contributed the plane and the pilots it took to film this video during parabolic flight. Basically, the plane climbs to a high altitude, then dives and accelerates into the dive so that the plane is able to match the rate the contents are falling at, messing with the gravity for the people and things inside. The plane could only dive for 27 seconds of weightlessness before having to pull out and re-set for the next parabola (gain in altitude and dive). There’s 20 seconds of double gravity both before and after the weightlessness, think of it like the plane is throwing you into the air and catching you at those moments.

To film the video in one take, the band choreographed their song so the various dance motions they did and the objects they threw took place during those 27 seconds of weightlessness. The problem was that “Upside Down & Inside Out” was written at 92.5 beats per minute (BPM) which musically would make divisions between the parts of the song (verse, chorus, etc) every 21 seconds. To solve the problem, the band slowed the track down to 78 BPM and performed the entire piece 28.47% slower.

The entire thing being shot in one take includes the plane having to climb back up to diving altitude. It took 45 minutes and 8 dives to shoot in its entirety. The band and dancers would perform the choreography in the 27 seconds of weightlessness, then position themselves for the double gravity and climb back up to the top of the parabola, then they would turn the music back on and perform for the next 27 second block.

There aren’t any cuts, there are morphs, where the frames between two points are condensed and blended so there isn’t any jumping objects or people from one shot to another. You can tell where these morphs are in the video because they are the moments where gravity briefly returns. The first part of the video with the band doing the laptop dance starts during the double gravity portion, then the first fall happens. The subsequent morphs are at 0:46, 1:06, 1:27, 1:48, 2:09, 2:30, and 2:50 in the video.

According to an interview with OK Go frontman Damian Kulash, the band never threw up, even though they were diving through the air for 45 minutes. “The band were on pretty heavy anti-nausea drugs,” he confesses, “Of course, given roughly 25-30 people on the plane and over the course of the 20 flights we did, we think there were 58 times that people puked. So it was averaging two to three per flight.